Looking For Fael

My first instinct with Looking For Fael was to wonder how a single apartment could sustain an entire game. A few hours later I had my answer: by refusing to stay a single apartment. Developed by Swing Swing Submarine and published by ARTE France, this is a first-person puzzle adventure in the Myst lineage, one where the environment is the puzzle rather than a backdrop for them. You receive a voicemail from your roommate Fael saying he is somehow lost inside your shared flat, and then the flat begins doing things flats should not do. Doors lead to wrong rooms. Rooms multiply. Reality folds into itself. The premise is quietly unsettling rather than scary, which suits the game's pace perfectly. The puzzles sit at the center of everything here, and they are the reason to show up. The game splits its challenges between environmental logic puzzles spread across its 3D spaces and mini-game sequences played on the Game Leaf, a retro handheld console that functions as your main tool throughout. The Game Leaf mechanic is a smart design choice: it gives a tactile, in-world reason for a mode shift rather than just throwing you into a separate screen. Each apartment zone follows its own internal rules, and once you absorb those rules, solutions click into place the way good puzzle design should. Critics have noted that the answers always follow the game's own logic, and that holds up. You will occasionally hit a wall that feels arbitrary, but working back through the clues usually reveals the solution was fair all along. The hint system exists but reviewers have flagged it as unreliable, so treat it as a last resort, not a first stop. There are real trade-offs to acknowledge. The narrative is thin by design. Fael exists mainly as a voice, an implied personality, and a trail of cleverly constructed puzzles. If you need a strong character story to stay engaged over a multi-hour session, this will feel sparse. Movement speed is also on the slower side, which some will find contemplative and others will find frustrating depending on their patience. The soundtrack lands somewhere between ambient and forgettable. None of these are deal-breakers for the right player, but they are worth naming up front so you know what you are walking into. What Looking For Fael does exceptionally well is visual imagination. Each room has its own atmosphere: a living room overgrown with vegetation, a cinema, a laboratory, and stranger spaces in between. The art is built around the work of comic book creator Benoit Leloup, and that lineage shows in the color and visual specificity. Players familiar with the liminal space aesthetic will find the tone exactly right. Early Steam reception is effectively unanimous, with users drawing comparisons to Myst and The Witness in terms of first-person exploration that rewards careful observation. For a puzzle game of this scope and runtime, that kind of reception signals genuine quality rather than launch-week enthusiasm.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Looking For Fael.